By many accounts now, it seems that Metallica’s creative well is starting to dry up, now that they have begun work on album number seven thousand. In an interview with UAE publication The National, Lars Ulrich has explained that the impact of their previous album, Death Magnetic, has made the release one hard act to follow.

The sticks man explains that when work starts on a new album, much of the creative direction is affected by the responses to the previous record:

“Obviously Death Magnetic was very positively received all over the world and I’m thankful for that. We’re now in the middle of making a new record, and so when you make a new record, you have a tendency to revisit the one you made previously, and I’ve heard a little bit of Death Magnetic over the last couple of months and it still sounds fantastic, so it will be a difficult record to follow.”

Surely none of this will stop them from releasing an album. They’ve been trying to successfully follow up The Black Album for years now with little to no luck.

Ulrich continues to explain in the interview that it isn’t as easy as one might think to compose 10-minute tracks with 8-minute guitar solos, adding that the band is hoping their upcoming live shows will reignite the flame prior to studio time:

“We are just writing at the moment. We haven’t started [tracking] the record. These live shows help indirectly. When we are writing at home a lot, we get kind of locked into that, so getting a chance to come to Abu Dhabi and then Cape Town and Johannesburg next week is kind of Metallica getting out of the house for two weeks. When we come back to write, we are inspired by the energy of playing to 20,000 people each night.”

Those who have been paying attention will know that the band have grand plans of not just completing the album and releasing it through their own brand-new record label Blackened Records, but rereleasing their entire back catalogue. Ulrich explains:

“Now that we own our own records and have our own label, we will probably take each album, remaster them and make them available with the latest technology and find interesting outtakes and additional things that will make it special. You do want to cash in, so if you can put some packages together that are special to the fans, it is worth doing.”

No form of release date has been locked in for the album, which is still a bit of a myth. Hetfield has promised a ‘diverse collection of songs’ and that’s about the only fact we have to roll on.